The Ethics of a Potential Urbanism explores the possible and potential relevance of Giorgio Agamben’s political thoughts and writings for the theory and the practice of architecture and urban design. It sketches out the potentiality of Agamben’s politics, which can affect change in current architectural and design discourses. The book investigates the possibility of an inoperative architecture, as an ethical shift for a different practice, just a little bit different, but able to deactivate the sociospatial dispositive and mobilize a new theory and a new project for the urban now to come. This particular reading from Agamben’s oeuvre suggests a destituent mode of both thinking and practicing of architecture and urbanism that could possibly redeem them from their social emptiness, cultural irrelevance, economic reductionism and proto-avant-garde extravagance, contributing to a renewed critical ‘encounter’ with architecture’s aesthetic-political function.

In the last decade a new wave of urban research has emerged, putting comparative perspectives back on the urban studies agenda. However, this research is frequently based on similar case studies on a few selected cities in America and Europe and all too often focus on the abstract city level with marginal attention given to particular local contexts. Moving away from loosely defined urban theories and contexts, this book argues it is time to start learning from and compare across different ‘contested cities’. It questions the long-standing Euro-centric academic knowledge production that is prevalent in urban studies and planning research. This book brings together a diverse range of international case studies from Latin America, South and South East Asia, Eastern Europe, Africa and the Middle East to offer an in-depth understanding of the worldwide contested nature of cities in a wide range of local contexts. It suggests an urban ontology that moves beyond the urban ‘West’ and ‘North’ as well as adding a comparative-relational understanding of the contested nature that ‘Southern’ cities are developing. This timely contribution is essential reading for those working in the fields of human geography, urban studies, planning, politics, area studies and sociology.

Much valued by design professionals, controversially discussed in the media, regularly misunderstood by the public and systematically regulated by public procurement; in recent years, architecture competitions have become projection screens for various and often incommensurable desires and hopes. Almost all texts on architectural competition engage it for particular reasons, whether these be for celebration of the procedure, or dismissal. Moving on from such polarised views, Architecture Competition is a revelatory study on what really happens when competitions take place. But the story is not just about architecture and design; it is about the whole construction process, from the definition of the spatial programme, to judgement and selection of projects and the realization of the building. This book explores the competition in the building process as it takes place, but also before and after its execution. It demonstrates that competitions are not just one step of many to be taken, but that competitive design procedures shape the entire process. Along the way the book exposes, among others, one of the key evolutions of design competitions – that competition procedures need to be regulated in order to respond to public awarding rules and need to integrate an increasing amount of given standards regarding, for example, efficiency, fire safety and thermal comfort. These notions force competing architects to respond to inflexible and overloaded competition programmes instead of focusing on genuinely crafting an architectural project. If the architecture competition wants to be more highly valued as a design tool, it should pay attention to the iterative nature of design and to the fact that perspectives on the problem often change in process.

Landscape and Agency explores how landscape, as an idea, a visual medium and a design practice, is organized, appropriated and framed in the transformation of places, from the local to the global. It highlights how the development of the idea of agency in landscape theory and practice can fundamentally change our engagement with future landscapes. Including a wide range of international contributions, each illustrated chapter investigates the many ways in which the relationship between the ideas and practices of landscape, and social and subjective formations and material processes, are invested with agency. They critically examine the role of landscape in processes of contemporary urban development, environmental debate and political agendas and explore how these relations can be analysed and rethought through a dialogue between theory and practice.

Daylight, Design and Place-Making examines the role of daylight in creating and revealing the wonders of heritage and contemporary architecture. Shifting from a purely technical approach to daylighting, this book places importance on the creation of meaningful aesthetics through an understanding of context and culture. Cultural applications of light in architecture differ depending on various historical, technological, and social characteristics. Increasingly, there is a revival of interest in contemporary architecture using daylight as an essential contextual ingredient in the design process. By examining the architecture of daylight in different locales and setting these in their historical contexts, the book argues that appropriate use of daylight will ensure not only visual and thermal comfort in the urban setting and aid in energy efficiency, but also will contribute to the overall identity of new buildings, particularly in urban regeneration projects. This book brings together an analysis of technical aspects of daylight performance and environmental impact, with discussions on the psychology of daylighting and its influence in shaping perceptions of our built environment. It will be an ideal read for academics and researchers interested in architecture and cultural studies.

In the 1970s and following on from the deposition of Salvador Allende, the Chilean dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet installed a radical political and economic system by force which lent heavy privilege to free market capitalism, reduced the power of the state to its minimum and actively suppressed civil society. Chicago economist Milton Friedman was heavily involved in developing this model, and it would be hard to think of a clearer case where ideology has shaped a country over such a long period. That ideology is still very much with us today and has come to be defined as neoliberalism. This book charts the process as it developed in the Chilean capital Santiago and involves a series of case studies and reflections on the city as a neoliberal construct. The variegated, technocratic and post-authoritarian aspects of the neoliberal turn in Chile serve as a cultural and political milieu. Through the work of urban scholars, architects, activists and artists, a cacophony of voices assemble to illustrate the existing neoliberal urbanism of Santiago and its irreducible tension between polis and civitas in the specific context of omnipresent neoliberalism. Chapters explore multiple aspects of the neoliberal delirium of Santiago: observing the antagonists of this scheme; reviewing the insurgent emergence of alternative and contested practices; and suggesting ways forward in a potential post-neoliberal city. Refusing an essentialist call, Neoliberalism and Urban Development in Latin America offers an alternative understanding of the urban conditions of Santiago. It will be essential reading to students of urban development, neoliberalism and urban theory, and well as architects, urban planners, geographers, anthropologists, economists, philosophers and sociologists.

Architecture manifests as a space of concealment and unconcealment, lethe and alêtheia, enclosure and disclosure, where its making and agency are both hidden and revealed. With an urgency to amplify narratives that are overlooked, silenced and unacknowledged in and by architectural spaces, histories and theories, this book contends the need for a critical study of hiding in the context of architectural processes. It urges the understanding of inherent opportunities, power structures and covert strategies, whether socio-cultural, geo-political, environmental or economic, as they are related to their hidescapes – the constructed landscapes of our built environments participating in the architectures of hiding. Looking at and beyond the intentions and agency that architects possess, architectural spaces lend themselves as apparatuses for various forms of hiding and un(hiding). The examples explored in this book and the creative works presented in the interviews enclosed in the interludes of this publication cover a broad range of geographic and cultural contexts, discursively disclosing hidden aspects of architectural meaning. The book investigates the imaginative intrigue of concealing and revealing in design processes, along with moral responsibilities and ethical dilemmas inherent in crafting concealment through the making and reception of architecture.

Challenging existing political analyses of the state of emergency in Turkey, this volume argues that such states are not merely predetermined by policy and legislation but are produced, regulated, distributed and contested through the built environment in both embodied and symbolic ways. Contributors use empirical critical-spatial research carried out in Turkey over the past decade, exploring heritage, displacement and catastrophes. Contributing to the broader literature on the related concepts of exception, risk, crisis and uncertainty, the book discusses the ways in which these phenomena shape and are shaped by the built environment, and provides context-specific empirical substance to it by focusing on contemporary Turkey. In so doing, it offers nuanced insight into the debate around emergency as well as into recent urban-architectural affairs in Turkey.

This book discusses the status of urban design as a disciplinary field and as a practice under the current and pervasive neoliberal regime. The main argument is that urban design has been wholly reshaped by neoliberalism. In this transformation, it has become a discipline that has neglected its original ethos – designing good cities – aligning its theory and practice with the sole profit-oriented objectives typical of advanced capitalist societies. The book draws on Marxism-inspired scholars for a conceptual analysis of how neoliberalism influenced the emergence of urbanism and urban design. It looks specifically at how, in urbanism's everyday dimensions, it is possible to find examples of resistance and emancipation. Based on empirical evidence, archival resources, and immersion in the socio-spatial reality of Santiago de Chile, the book illustrates the way neoliberalism compromises urban designers’ ethics and practices, and therefore how its theories become instrumental to the neoliberal transformation of urban society represented in contemporary urbanisms. It will be a valuable resource for academics and students in the fields of architecture, urban studies, sociology and geography.

This book is about urban infrastructuring as the processes linking infrastructural configurations and their components with other social, ecological, political, or otherwise defined systems as part of urbanisation and globalisation in the Global South. It suggests that infrastructuring is essential to urbanisation and that it is entangled with socio-spatio-ecological transformations that often have negative outcomes over time. Furthermore, it argues that infrastructuring requires an ethical positioning in research and practice in order to enhance infrastructural sustainability in the face of intersecting environmental, social and economic crises. “Urban Infrastructuring” is developed in three parts. First, it identifies infrastructural entanglements across various urban and urbanising settings in the Global South. Second, it highlights some of the damaging processes and outcomes of urban infrastructuring and argues that the absence, presence and transformation of infrastructure in the Global South (re-)produces socioecological injustice in the short- and long term. Third, the book argues for a shift of infrastructuring agendas towards more just and sustainable interventions. It suggests that an ethico-politics of care should be embedded in systems approaches to infrastructuring in both research and practice. The edited volume contains contributions from authors with backgrounds in a variety of academic disciplines from the natural and social sciences, engineering and the humanities. It provides valuable insights for anyone concerned with the study, design, planning, implementation and maintenance of urban infrastructures to enhance human well-being and sustainability. It will be of interest to researchers and urban decision-makers alike.